Small Businesses Need Security Too

Speaker Notes for Tomorrow’s Session in Cincinnati…

This morning I am headed to Ohio to meet with business leaders in the Cincinnati area – Another Digital Money session on Stopping Hackers!

If you provide IT services to businesses, I hope you’ll consider doing one of these with me at some point. Every business needs it, and most don’t understand the threats they are up against.

It’s a busy fall for us. Last week we wrapped up a session in San Francisco with large reseller executives, then headed down to work with a large sales team in Irvine, CA. And tomorrow, Cincinnati, a session sponsored by InTrust-IT…

The Most Frequently Misunderstood Truth In Small Business

The big question always comes up, “Why would anyone want my data? After all, we’re just a local business. There’s nothing interesting here.” I think Verne Harnish answered that question last week. If you’ve read his books, Rockefeller Habits, and Scaling Up, you know he’s a small business with very little in the way of infrastructure. Like me, he’s a speaker and a business coach, supported by a small team. Yet his blog post tells the story of a $400K ruse that caught him and his team completely by surprise.

Why small business? Because small businesses still have money, take out loans, and process credit cards. They have bank accounts and payrolls. Today’s hacking tools are largely automated. So sending out hundreds or thousands of scamming emails takes the hacker very little time. When one lands, the hacker will follow up. Small businesses are also largely unprotected by this sort of thing.

It might be a fraudulent invoice or request for ACH wire transfer. In Verne’s case he writes, “They sent an email to my assistant completely imitating my style, subject line, and signature asking her to wire funds to three different places.” This is getting more and more common. The more data we put online about ourselves, the easier it is for someone to impersonate us!

Tomorrow’s Session is About Digital Money and the Value of Data

Digital Money, my latest book, goes into detail on this. Data aggregation is in motion, pooling our data in one place where it can be analyzed.

There are several major data aggregators out there doing this. But the idea is to collect enough data to profile YOU. This is usually for the purpose of some analysis or marketing effort. We’re seeing it used right now in the election. That’s right. The candidates are leveraging this data to figure out who is likely to be on the edge, and needs a push. The data tells them both who to target and how to influence them.

That data in the hands of the hacker allows the hacker to act just like Verne, or whoever they need to be, to issue orders to the team. Verne’s on stage in Russia, meanwhile his team is getting instructions to transfer funds. Will they? Of course. They’ve received these requests in the past, and they were real. There’s no reason to question them now, and the hacker knows that. These attacks are well scripted and highly successful. And the likelihood of prosecution is low.

Can it be stopped? Not completely. But there are ways to reduce the risk…and that moves us to a managed security program that involves people and technology, well equipped to deal with these common attacks. A program that detects these threats early on, before data has been compromised, and stops them before damage is done. Tomorrow, my goal is to give our audience the business-level understanding they need to make wise decisions going forward. And then to point them to the tools and process they’ll need to combat these attacks in the coming year.